Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

I bought this game after seeing a trailer and watching some of the Dev Diaries. That being said, I didn't know much about the game apart from that so I went in pretty blind. Let me start by saying that this game is probably not for everybody. If you're looking for a lot of action, hard fights or challenging puzzles, Hellblade is not what you're looking for. It's a story driven, cinematic experience where you have to solve puzzles and fight enemies to advance in the game, all the while finding out more about the world and yourself. The atmosphere in this game is great, the sound is out of this world and the graphics are beautiful to look at. On your path, you'll learn a lot about nordic mythology. The controls are very easy to learn and they work well. The puzzles are pretty easy most of the time, on some you have a timelimit, with others, you can take as much time as you want. They're not very hard or diverse, but they fit beautifully into the game and its world. The fighting is also very easy to pick up. You have a few different attack moves, strong, fast and kick, you can block, counter and dodge. You can abuse the dodge pretty hard which basically makes you invulnerable, and there's not much enemy variety. To me this wasn't a problem since the game's focus is not on fighting at all. It serves more as a "plot device", and in that regard its simplicity was a positive thing to me. All in all, I haven't enjoyed a game as much as Hellblade in a long time. Took me about 8 hours to play through, you can probably be faster, but I took my time going through because, like I said, it just has amazing atmosphere and I've never seen facial animations as great as in this game. It's emotional, heartbreaking, saddening, yet eerily beautiful. Headphones are a must and I recommend playing at night with lights out and nothing to distract you around. Well worth the 30€ I spent on it.

What a really great game. Finished in 8 hours, but a really nice adventure to go through. Really beautiful atmosphere, graphics, and Senua is just amazing. If you search for a hack and slash, it's not this kind of game, there is fights, which are ok, but they are not the most important thing in this game. I'm usually the kind of person passing the dialogues and videos, but I haven't had the idea to do it here, I even don't know if it is possible or not ^^

This is a tough one. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice goes beyond where games usually dwell. It dares to explore the darkest corners of the human mind - mental illness. It is an extraordinary journey that features a lot of dark places we usually avoid admitting they even exist. Yet, they are there and this game makes a very considered and measured study of what it is to have your reality torn to pieces and then recreated in a bewildering, even mystic fashion. It would be very easy to fall into tackiness when dealing with issues like hearing voices or seeing bizarre and mysterious patterns, but Hellblade: Senua's sacrifice handles this in a very respectful way. It helps that the developers took their time studying what mental illness is and actually speaking to people who have suffered from and recover from psychosis. It is by no means less frightening to see such personal experiences given flesh. I will admit, this game is haunting, yet magical in its own way. The game does have a number of features that could have been done better. For instance, there is a lack of variety in opponents and combat is not really inventive, though it is fluid. Yet, the rest of the game's components more than make up for problems in gameplay. While some might point to the story's linearity as a downside, I believe it wouldn't work otherwise and giving players more freedom to explore would lessen the impact of Senua's journey. Graphics are amazing and motion-capture technology has evolved enough to recreate an immense array of human emotions. Voice acting is superb, with sound being where the game shines the most. I'd strongly recommend playing this with a surround sound system, it creates a very atmospheric feel that contributes incredibly to the overall impression. In conclusion, I strongly recommend its game. While relatively short (less than 10 hours), it is time and money well spent.

Bad gam play and poor puzzles

There is no education here. Just look at settings for Controls. Remember retro games. Bad puzzles with much running simutaion. Can't suffer this gameplay to learn the story.